Published by Aperture in 2012, Petrochemical America examines a 150-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Richard Misrach’s photographs attend to Louisiana’s “Chemical Corridor,” where refineries and other sites of intensive production occupy a landscape also marked by homes, communities, and environmental damage. The region became widely known as “Cancer Alley” after unusual incidences of cancer drew public attention to the health consequences associated with its industrial concentration.

The book’s defining method is collaborative. Misrach’s photographs are accompanied by landscape architect Kate Orff’s Ecological Atlas, a body of research-based maps and speculative drawings. Rather than allowing the photographs to stand as isolated scenes, the atlas traces relationships among industrial systems, economic structures, cultural histories, physical geography, and patterns of contamination. Image and analysis perform different tasks: one registers how petrochemical development appears within lived space; the other makes visible networks and consequences that cannot be contained in a single frame.

This structure gives the project a reach beyond conventional landscape documentation. The Mississippi corridor remains a specific place with its own history, yet the book treats it as a concentrated example of petrochemicals’ presence throughout contemporary life. Its subject is therefore not simply the spectacle of industrial infrastructure, but the difficulty of separating modern consumption and economic activity from environmental and human costs.

For collectors, the book merits attention as a carefully conceived intersection of photography, landscape architecture, mapping, and environmental inquiry. The 2012 Aperture hardcover brings Misrach and Orff’s distinct practices into a single, multilayered publication whose argument depends upon their juxtaposition. It is especially relevant to collections concerned with American landscape photography, industrial history, ecological representation, or the photobook as a form of cross-disciplinary research.